


A Fight Club, in Belleville

by Jen_A



Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: Frerard, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-22
Updated: 2014-03-22
Packaged: 2018-01-16 14:59:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1351663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jen_A/pseuds/Jen_A
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gerard finds himself trying to find the art in an unexpected panorama, a fight. However, he seems to be distracted by a pair of yellow eyes watching him from the crowd.</p>
<p>Frerard.<br/>Not related to the movie's plot, but the story inside it is inspired on it.<br/>This story was originally written in spanish.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Fight Club, in Belleville

The noise caught our attention as we were walking home from the club. Mikey seemed much more interested than me, and moved toward the sound of many voices shouting incoherently. I followed lazily, yawning because it was almost dawn and we had been drinking heavily that night. I lost my brother inside the first barrier of people (or, to be more exact, the throng of males injected with adrenaline and insanity - a horde of frenzied brutality.) Apparently, someone was fighting in the center of the crowd, but I couldn’t see anything - until I caught Mikey off to the side.

“I think I've seen him around,” my brother mused, adjusting his glasses on the edge of his nose and pointing into the center of the circle “the short one.” I nodded and lit a cigarette.

I found some space in between a couple of taller guys in front of us and had a look. There was blood all over the asphalt, and the larger of the two fighters was overturned on the ground, trash from the street stuffed into his mouth, a cigarette butt glued to one cheek. The other guy, the one who my brother said he had seen around, had one of his leather boots pressed against the fallen dude’s neck. Much as I tried, I could not recognize him; his face was too distorted from the fight and there was blood dripping everywhere. I saw him kicking slowly into the taller man’s ribs and then I heard him laugh when the other man screamed in complaint and then snarled, which apparently meant that he had surrendered. The boy (because he could have more than twenty,) raised his arms in victory and smiled as if he had just won a poker game and hadn’t had his face, quite literally, turned to shit.

After a few moments, everyone scattered. I thought I'd seen some bills roll by, but what I did see left me even more terrified. The guy who had just eaten dust raised himself up from the ground and hugged the young boy tightly. My cigarette fell from my lips and onto my shoes. My brother hit me in the chest with his hand.

“It's like a fight club,” he whispered slowly.

“They’re fucking crazy,” I murmured slowly, noticing the eyes of the younger fighter who had been watching me inordinately, tricky, as if he wanted to lure me into the center of the ring.

I turned away and, pulling on my brother's jacket, got him to leave the place with me.

After three days, however, the incident repeated. This time, it was after a punk gig up in the very north of New Jersey, much further away than Clifton. We’d had problems with our car engine and had to stop at a service station for help. In the distance, we heard noises just behind the property. Mikey walked leisurely towards the noise, without a hint of fear, and then shouted at me.

“Gerard, come see this!”

I followed him, because apparently we were stuck there for the night anyway, waiting for some part – fucking hell – and had nothing better to do. It was cold - my fingers were freezing. It was the exact same scene as before: a circle of mindless troglodytes, shouting and booing like apes in the jungle - a deplorable and depressing spectacle. Inside the center of the circle was a very tall guy beating a very fat guy mercilessly. They were different than the guys from the other night, but I was curious and searched the crowd for a familiar face. I saw him – the kid who Mikey had recognized - off to the left of me, watching the fight with a sanctimonious smile on his face.

His face was less swollen than it had been that night, but you could still see the damage from the fight on him. He had an inflamed lip, red and busted, and one of his eyebrows was covered with a white Band-Aid. Both of his cheekbones were pronounced, but they were each a different color: one purple and the other very, very green. Perhaps he had taken the hits on different occasions. This time I did see his eyes more clearly in the absence of blood dripping into them, and they were a very strange color. He wore an expression of easy confidence which, out of curiosity, subdued my ill temper as my gaze drew his attention. As his eyes met mine, I saw that their odd color was yellow, like some might say that the devil has. Maybe I saw them as being that powerful because of the moonlight which illuminated his face, or maybe just because he was looking right at me as his smile faded. He turned and whispered to someone next to him and it was about me, I was sure of it, since he pointed toward me with his entire body. I was so shaken that I could hardly bare to turn away and look at Mikey.

“We’d better get going.” I whispered to my brother, who was mesmerized by the fight and didn’t take his eyes off of it as he responded.

“Have you lost your mind?” he almost shouted. “The car is broken. Anyway, I won’t leave until I see who wins. Ten dollars on the fat guy, by the way” he said distractedly. I sighed and lit another cigarette, but when I looked up, I realized that the guy with the yellow eyes was no longer in his place, which made my blood run cold.

“Fucking hell, Mikey! If this is a fight club, we could be in serious trouble here. Mom gets hysterical enough when I bring you home drunk; imagine what she would do to me if I take you home beaten and looking like shit.” I growled. My brother just hit me on the shoulder, but planted his feet and kept his eyes on the fight. I huffed off in frustration.

I returned to the car and opened the hood. Although I didn’t know that much about mechanics, I understood a little just by common sense. At least, I knew that the engine fuming was a bad sign. In addition, it was late and the mechanic didn’t answer the phone. I got back into the car and turned the ignition, but the engine just crackled and then…nothing. I was getting desperate. When I returned to check the engine again, I realized that I was no longer alone. The kid from the fight was there, with his swollen face, looking at me with such cunning that I felt blind. Next to him was another guy, one that was probably twice his size.

“Having problems with the car?” asked the young boy, looking at me with his rough eyes. I nodded.

“Something is wrong with the engine” I tried not to stammer.

The other guy came and gave a peek inside.

“I think it's the carburetor” he said.

“Uh...what's that?” I laughed.

The boy also let go a giggle - a very loud and rhythmic one that made me glance over and catch his sneer, his arms crossed over his chest. Just then, I realized that he was covered in tattoos.

“You'll have to replace the one you have now; it’s old and has stopped providing air to the engine. Where were you headed to? I could give you a ride” the big guy offered in a friendly tone which left me cold. Maybe I was being way too apprehensive.

“We’re heading to Belleville” I said slowly.

“Oh. Well, I'm going further up north, but Frank lives in Belleville. Can you give them a ride?” he asked the boy in his rough voice, and I was lost for a moment.

The young boy’s name was Frank: the same man who had defeated the big guy the other day, the one with the strange and demonic eyes, the one with his arms full of tattoos, the one beside me making fun of my dazed expression.

“Sure... after the fight finishes” he said graciously, and then he pointed towards a military green Jeep Wrangler across the street. “I’ll see you next to my car as soon as the fight is over.”

With that, I saw him promptly disappear back into the crowd and I went to find Mikey. I felt on edge, and I wasn’t sure if I was excited or scared of whatever that was coming. I didn’t see Frank in the crowd, but I did watch the fight, and it got me thinking. What I originally saw as a meaningless and completely absurd act now had me viewing it in admiringly as compared to the film. Perhaps these guys sought to embrace what the film had shown them: to feel like men and to feel alive, that thing about the pure adrenaline and fear.

It had become a trend, the fight clubs, all over the country, after that movie aired in 1999…but we were already in the twenty-first century. It had been three years since the movie came out; I would never have imagined that people still kept themselves involved, and in such a clandestine way. Was this even legal at all?

I rambled on in my thoughts like that throughout the night, because only after the sun came out did the round of fights finally get called off. The guys were being randomly selected, it seemed - although some had volunteered. Everyone showed signs of having fought and enjoyed it; none of them approached the fight with fear or prejudice, they kindly greeted their opponent and then knocked their teeth out with their fists. Such brutality made me nauseous. I was a pacifist, avoiding confrontation at all costs. I was an artist as well, and I just could not see the art in the banal act of beating someone until you made them vomit blood.

Mikey fell asleep in the jeep while we waited for Frank. As we drove off into the sunlight, I saw him differently. He drove with the same ease with which I had seen him fight before: without fear, evading all the cars on the road, while I had tight knot in my stomach. He said that he knew nothing about cars and talked about how cold it would be that winter. He spoke about some parks in Belleville and the colors of autumn leaves. He averred that he hated big cities and small cars. He mentioned some people that he knew in town and places where he’d had lunch. Not even once did he speak about his fight club, and I never asked about it; I just listened to him speak. Frank didn’t stay quiet, and his lack of shyness rendered me speechless.

When he dropped us off home, I noticed that he read our street name and house number. It was easy to remember: my house was barely two feet away from the sign that read "Welcome to Belleville" on a curved asphalt entrance, and it was the only one that already had Christmas decorations up.  
I never gave him my name and neither did my brother. We got out of the car and didn’t even shake his hand. We just walked away and he just drove off.

That evening, I drew image after image of heinous fights after having slept all morning. Hours later, we went to pick up our car, and I went to bed thinking that there must be something which made Frank so interested in the fight club. Something more than blood, adrenaline and pain, something more artistic. I needed to find out what it was.

Mikey began his vacation two weeks later. Meanwhile, I kept looking for the street fights. Sometimes I just couldn’t find them, but other times, they were easy to find. In all of them, I saw Frank. I decided to watch from afar, with the desire to find the art in that empty act. And little by little, I discovered so many things.

There were the guys who cried: they cried when they won and when they lost - not in defeat, but from having survived the event. There were friends who celebrated when one of them was selected and beamed proudly at every punch received and every one given.

I found differences between these fights and the other common acts of male hordes, like going to a bar to drink till you drop, watch strippers or spend a week’s salary in a casino. The fight was corporeal, involving both the mind with strategy and the body with motor skills and balance, using all five senses at the same time. The fight was like having sex: it was exhausting and satisfying, it was hard and pushed the limits of the production of testosterone. Contrary to what I thought in the beginning, the other things were trivial, mundane acts because they weren’t corporeal, because they were quantifiable, because they included money and this one didn’t, because the others had remorse and in this one there was satisfaction, memories, because in the other acts, a wound was equivalent to defeat; in the fights, a wound was equivalent to bravery, to courage.

Once I found a meaning in all of this, I could draw the fights better, I could give them more feeling. That's when I realized that most of the guys, like the ones in the movie, were just common people. They were people with monotonous jobs, with physical defects (like the guy who was too tall, or the other who was too fat and was finished after one minute of battle, and the one who had only one arm and the other who was missing an eye.) One man was a preschool teacher in a small town, another worked with old people in a care facility. Perhaps the emptiness of their lives was resolved by finding a place where their bodies were those of real men, unaffected by the prejudices of their professions or their appearances. They were heroes in the fight club, while in their regular lives, they were lowly men. Here, they were celebrated and congratulated; in real life, they were apprehended for their mistakes. In the fight club, there was no such thing as mistakes - on the contrary, they had more courage than any other man.

Frank however, didn’t fit in there. He was handsome, confident and powerful. That doubt was the one which made me continue going, day after day, for two weeks, until that time when I ended up in the center of the ring.

It was in a secluded park, one so old that no one visits. There were so many guys - about thirty or forty of us - the truth is that I don’t remember. I was the only one with a clean face and, without being able to prevent it, I was gathered by several arms and dragged into the center of the circle, surrounded by everyone else. I tried to explain that I wasn’t there to fight, but the roar of the crowd drowned me out, and no one heard me. Frank however, looked at me carefully and he knew I was scared, but there was nothing I could do to get out of the mess I had dragged myself into. A tall, skinny guy - no taller than me - stood in front of me as he bragged about the wounds on his face and his fists to the circle of spectators. He offered me his hand, as is the tradition, but I didn’t take it. I tried to explain again to him that I didn’t want to fight, but no one heard me.

I received the first fist in the right cheek and it hurt terribly. I felt my whole world bounce in front of me; it was like living it all in slow motion, listening to the sounds and seeing so many eyes watching me. I didn’t hit back, but instead got another punch to the ribs and another on my left eyebrow. The blood which covered my face awoke me to the reality of the whole thing: that what I was feeling was probably one of the most extreme feelings in the world - it was like going on a rollercoaster at 200 miles per hour, driving a car without brakes, having a fifth orgasm in one night. I know that with my elbow I had to have hit him somewhere, because my bones hurt. I know that he returned the hit directly to my face and that I started bleeding from my lower lip. I know I fell on my face when he hit me in the stomach, and I remember that because I lost my wind and ended up seeing everything blurrily from the asphalt. There was one more punch, a kick to my ribs in the same place as before and I let out a cry with all of my strength “No more!” and closed my eyes.

I felt embarrassed and impoverished on the cold, sandy ground. I thought I would be booed because I had given up on a fight, but instead, I felt different pairs of arms raising me up and received encouraging pats on my back. I didn’t judge myself as a loser anymore. I considered myself a winner without a victory, a champion without a trophy. That feeling, without any doubt, was great – and then I passed out.

When I woke up, I was in a place I didn’t recognize, on a small bed that smelled like cigarettes, sweat and blood. I rose up to find Frank in front of me, reading the newspaper on a chair, legs stretched out and resting on the edge of the bed, the soles of his shoes directly over my jeans. I squeezed the eye that hurt the most and noticed the dried blood covering the whiteness of my skin.

Frank looked up then. “Oh, good thing that you finally woke up” he said without emotion, turning a page in his paper, reading slowly and with interest.

“Where am I?” I whispered, the sickening taste in my mouth making me want to throw up, and I gagged.

Frank looked back up at me “In my house” he said casually.

“You’re not the first one to go through this” he continued “Many others have fallen unconscious after their first fight. I don’t think it’s out of weakness or anything; just the collapse of the mind to the abrupt sensations, like when you have a powerful orgasm and fall asleep right away” he smirked.

I saw that his face was almost entirely recovered; there was no sign that he had fought recently - just a few bruises on his skin.

“I'd rather leave my pleasures to myself” I snapped. When I turned to see where I was lying before, I noticed large bloodstains, and felt my hair wet. “You could have cleaned me up - I ruined your sheets.” I whispered without shame.

Frank laughed. “No, Gerard. You need to see yourself, to see the blood on your face and clean it yourself, you need to see your own wounds and appreciate them, remember them. I was not going to take that privilege away from you” he said so seriously that I found myself attributing his words to the conclusions I had drawn before.

I saw him pointing toward a door which I thought must be the bathroom, and I stood up. Indeed, despite the repugnance that I felt, you could call that pigsty a bathroom with a sink. I didn’t even dare to lift the lid of the toilet. The shower was dirty and full of mold, and the first stream of water coming from the nozzle was brown. I went to look myself in the mirror while waiting for the water to get a little cleaner. My face looked broken and my eyebrow would be scarred for life. I felt all of the anger, rage and helplessness which I hadn’t had the chance to appreciate during the fight return. I left the water running as I vacated the bathroom.

“You didn’t clean yourself” Frank sighed while getting up. He left the newspaper on the bed, looking at me and how angry I was.

“I didn’t want to fight and you knew it... damn it” I growled.

Frank laughed. “What is it that bothers you so much? If you had come to observe us for two weeks, widening your prejudices and inventing nonsensical meanings, you had to feel it; you had to have fought to really feel it. Don’t you see it now?”

His patience was overwhelming and I had no retort. However, when I turned to leave, I felt him grab my arm.

“Come on, I'll help you with that.”

I let him guide me - perhaps only because I wanted to continue speaking to him.

His room was at the end of a corridor which was missing some wooden planks. It was simple, but cleaner than the room that we were in before. The bed was queen-sized it also had bloodstains, the walls were dirty and old, the window covered by pieces of cardboard. There was a guitar in the corner, a stack of books next to the bed and several notebooks spread on the floor.

“Sit” he requested pointing to the bed. I sat. “Why did you come see us if your intention wasn’t to fight?” he asked from afar, from the inside of his bathroom and while I listened the water running, I thought about my answer. “Are you allergic to any medications, Gerard?” he asked. I was wondering how he knew my name, and then I reached into my back pocket and noticed that I no longer had my wallet there.

“I had no intentions of anything” I said in a loud tone.

“Your wallet is over by the books” he said, and then I saw it and went to pick it up. I checked that everything was in order: I had the same $55 dollars and my grandmother’s picture next to ticket of the last Iron Maiden concert I went to, my driver’s license and my university card, which had already expired.

“So…” he said while leaving the bathroom “What is an artist doing in a fight club?”

“I was observing.” I said calmly. Frank had a cotton ball, water and bandages in his hands. I went back to the bed and he sat down in front of me.

“How much of an idiot are we?” he joked and giggled. I couldn’t hide my smile as I felt him wiping the blood from my face.

“In fact, I was trying to find the artistic side of it” I explained. He opened his mouth to respond, but then only sighed.

“I have noticed that what you have is not a horde of vandalism” I explained.

“I have nothing. It’s not mine, it's theirs. I just painted their wings and they learned how to fly on their own” he said with an honest expression.

I nodded. “Why?” I dared to ask.

Frank laughed. “Not ‘Why?’ but ‘What for?’" he conferred between soft laughs. “It began as an experiment, when I left college and realized that I didn’t appreciate myself enough. I didn’t trust what I was capable of doing or not doing. First, I fought in bars and concerts, but then I started doing it just to feel like I was alive, because tomorrow may never come, and I needed to feel that adrenaline every day. I needed to feel that power.”

“It may sound selfish - take it as you want to - but I got tired of living for others and started living for myself. I dropped out of college and went back to playing guitar, my vice. In the evenings, I go to the fights to see all of those guys who thought they were shit feel like they have something amazing inside, and that that makes everything else worth the pain that they feel in their bodies.”

Frank took a breath as he continued cleaning the blood; the water was now red and thick. “This is not a fight club, it's not” he said “It’s much more of a rebellion against our own paradigms; doing what you never thought you’d be capable of, feeling like you never felt before. The power of hitting without remorse or guilt, without consequence - because all of that is secondary. What really matters is what you feel, here.” He gently poked my hurt ribs. “And what you feel here” he touched my lips with his fingertips.

“Tell me if you ever felt your body as you feel it today? Because you are really feeling it, you’re noticing your body physically. Usually, you’re a thought floating adrift, observing others without feeling yourself. It's like having sex, falling in love. It's like when someone close to you dies: it hurts and you cry. It’s having a body and being able to experience its sensations every day, knowing that you live and that you live for yourself, knowing that you feel pain and passion, and all of that transforms you”.

He looked back at me again, I had been watching him quietly, appreciating every word that he said. “It's like when you expect a kiss which never comes, and when it finally does, your heart explodes: endorphins everywhere, testosterone, adrenaline shoots, but then suddenly it ends and you want more and more and then, at some point you’ll stop feeling that emotion because you’ll get used to the kissing, to the sex and the orgasms... but this, Gerard.” he touched my eyebrow hard, making me whimper.  
“This feeling never goes away” he concluded and I saw him stand up with the bowl of water and then he came back with a clean towel to cover my face with the bandages. “Do you understand the artistry of the act now?” He asked. I nodded.

“I think it's time for me to leave” I told him.

I went down the old stairs of his house and only when I was already outside and after passing through the old iron gate did I realize that Frank was living in an abandoned house; one of those confiscated by the state. Strangely, I didn’t feel sorry for him: I admired him without even being able to help it. That night, when I got home, I drank a huge cup of coffee and I brought to life with my pencil all those things that he told me.

I stopped going to see the fights, because I suddenly felt inspired in a huge way. I think I wrote, painted, drew and sketched more in that week than I ever did in my entire life. In just one short moment, I had enough artwork to fill an entire gallery, enough written for an entire book. Everything was about the fight club, about the men who went to offer their courage in exchange for some punches and how that made them feel alive, made them feel that their problems were small. How the pains on their bodies reminded them of the courage that they had, what they really were, what they did and what they endured.

On the fifth day of my absence to the ring, someone knocked on the door of my basement. I found it odd, because only a few people knew of my return to town and that door had been closed for years. When I looked outside, I could see the swollen face of Frank and his big eyes looking at me, as a silent prayer for me to open the door for him.

“What do you want?” I asked as I opened the door just a little, and the cold air slipping into the room.

“You haven’t come back” he sounded like a kid who had lost a toy, which confused me.

“I told you that I don’t intend to fight” I explained. He tried to pass through the door, but I stopped him. “No” I refused.

He was watching me, his eyes fixed on mine. Then he reached into his pockets and pulled out a cigarette.

“You have to feel it, Gerard.” he insisted, “You haven’t felt the power of your hands, the power of your entire body, you haven’t felt the adrenaline yet. You must, you have to go back.”

“Go to hell, Frank.” I answered slowly and shut the door in his face.

I didn’t hear back from him until a week later, when the snow began to fall and the inertia made me walk from park to park, bar to bar, alley to alley, until I found them again at the north of town. I remained watching from afar. To my surprise, I found my brother in the crowd. He looked at me in surprise.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him. He seemed just as amazed to see me as I was to see him.

“I’m waiting for my turn” he said seriously.

My eyes widened. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“No, Gerard. Let me. I’ve seen them everywhere, walking with their heads held high, afraid of no one. I've seen them fight bigger guys who were stronger than them without a hint of fear. I want to be able to do the same.” His words were so accurate that I couldn’t object.

That night, carried my brother home on my shoulders. He had a broken rib and couldn’t breathe well. My mother had never being angrier, made far worse by our silence, since we couldn’t tell anyone what had happened.

Two days later, I walked out of the art store, late at night, when I heard an unmistakable sound. The streets were already covered in snow and it was cold as hell, but they were there, doing the same thing as always. Sometimes I wondered how was that they evaded the police, but when I saw the sheriff among the other boys that night, I put my speculations aside. It was an open club, a social plot. I weaved my way into the front row, watching a fight that was ending, because one guy was already doubled over the snow, bathed in his own blood. As he surrendered, they all celebrated, helping him up and gathering him into a group hug.

I raised my head to find Frank staring at me. He smiled at me sideways, perhaps because seeing me there made him feel victorious, but the malice in his eyes made me believe that he had hidden motives. Then he took three steps ahead until he reached the center of the ring. I swallowed hard; I would see him fight again. I’d see on his face the artwork which he’d spoken about. Despite the cold, he took off his shirt. His chest was tattooed, as well was his back. Then he got close to one of his henchmen and whispered something in his ear - a whisper which went through the crowd. Before I noticed, I had been pushed to the center of the ring, in front of Frank.

“No. I’m not going to fight.” I turned my back on him. I still had my art supplies in a bag in my hand, but Frank didn’t care, and he placed himself in front of me.

Unexpectedly even, I just ran into his eyes as he was already hitting me on the right cheek. I don’t know if what I felt was anger or repression; I couldn’t understand the rage gnawing at my bones. I didn’t know if I wanted to give him the pleasure of me fighting back or to let him kick my ass, but after a few more hits, of feeling his fists on my chin and on my ribs, I hit back with an elbow to his back and he fell to his knees. He got up smiling and victorious, as if his pride could ever be hurt. All around us, there was a strange silence. The fights were always accompanied by shouts and cheers, but not this one; this one was apparently something more intimate, something artistic.

Frank pushed me after; his fist pummeled my lip and I started to bleed. Then I remembered what he had said to me: the way that he spoke of the pain, the taste of blood in my mouth and knowing that I was alive, that my fists on him shouldn’t be an act of revenge, but an act of vindication to myself, for myself. I raised my arm and hit him on his upper lip and saw him bleed, but what struck me was not his blood or his pain, but mine, the pain of hitting my fist against his teeth. His blood was all over my skin, and it slowly dripped onto the snow, dying it red.

At that moment I knew that Frank had been right about everything. The fight was not a banal or savage act, it was an act of courage and bravery. It was about knowing myself and what I was capable of. It was about feeling the rush of a hit and loading my fist to return it. The fight was about falling and getting up, swallowing and spitting blood. It was about losing balance and recovering it. It was a plain and simple life lesson in every punch thrown, in every drop of blood that fell to the ground. He was also right about the intensity of it, in which being in love never made someone feel so alive as compared to the moment in which the whole body ached and felt afflicted, that moment in which the bones creaked and still you were responsible for the act and had no remorse or guilt, nor consequences.

Frank's experience was no match for mine, and he knocked me out. I remember swallowing snow mixed with blood and dirt, my face hitting the cold ground - it was freezing - and then many arms lifting me up off the ground.

I woke up again at his place, but in his bed. I had all my clothes on and my wallet in its place. I can’t describe the pain in my body, because it’d be enough to say that the contractions in my stomach and my face felt like a thousand knives at one time, but no. The description of that pain was not a complaint, it was something else: it was having proven to myself that I could feel more than the brief emotions of the body and that, without any doubt, I’d remember that pain forever, I’d remember that fight forever.  
I saw Frank leaving his bathroom; apparently he had showered.

“How do you feel?” he asked as I realized that I had left wounds on his face. I still had blood on my fist.

“The truth is that I don’t know” I said seriously, tasting the bitter blood in my mouth.

“That's the answer I expected to hear” he smiled, and though I don’t understand the reason, I smiled too.

I went to wipe my face off in the bathroom. My lip was split and both of my checks were bruised. I had another mark over my forehead and one on my jaw.

“I left clean clothes over the bathtub for you if you want to take a bath” he said from somewhere behind me. I closed the door and started taking off my clothes.

The throbbing in my ribs hurt, and I had a nasty greenish stain on my skin. I poked myself to check that nothing was broken and, although I hurt like hell, I preferred not to complain as it was not the right situation to do so. My legs were also bruised, my knees sore and bleeding, and I had ruined my favorite black jeans.

I took a short shower, only until the water stopped swirling redly down the drain.

The clothes which Frank had left for me were pajamas: gray cotton pants and a thin white shirt. I stayed in the bathroom a little longer, thinking about whether I should go home or not, considering the idea of staying the night and talking some with him, wondering if this had become a vice for me like it was for all the other men of his club.

“Gerard? Do you want some coffee?” he asked and the craving for caffeine made me leave the bathroom quickly.

We drank sitting on his bed, leaning side by side against the backboard, as he told me why he had chosen me to fight.

“You needed to feel the pain you feel now, the blood in your mouth, the power in your hands. I know that you’ve recognized the art of the act already and the truth is that I don’t want you to fight again. You're an artist, Gerard, and you ended up in the ring because you had to find inspiration in an unexpected world which you never planned to find. Sometimes it’s just like that, and it works better than what you actively pursued. The unexpected is always more exciting, much stronger when it comes to emotions. If you expect something, like I said before…if you expect a kiss, then when it finally comes, you feel all the endorphins and the testosterone, but then all of that dissolves. But if you aren’t waiting for it and arrives, the feeling may be totally new, incomprehensible and even stronger... as intense as you want it to be.”

His eyes were fixed on me with every word. Then as he said, without me expecting it at all, he placed his lips on mine. At first it hurt, and there was no room for the alleged thrill of the unexpected - it hurt for the both of us, because we both moaned with pain. However, after it ceased to be just pressure and became a soft touch, after the wetness of his mouth invaded mine and I could feel the taste of blood, at that time, it came and he was right, the feeling was so intense that the pain in my body disappeared and all of my complaints became moans of pleasure. Perhaps my thoughts were not entirely rational, because I didn’t understand the impulse that I felt to kiss Frank back. I squeezed his neck and tangled my fingers in his hair. My split lip was caressed by his tongue repeatedly, I barely separated from him just to look into his eyes, just to make sure that we were doing this for the same reasons; an irrationality that surpassed us and the intensity of the pain on our bodies that we wanted to disappear.

Not ever stopping the kiss, we pushed our coffee cups off of our laps. Frank touched my ribs, for a moment making that pain return to my body, but when I laid down on the bed and he placed himself over me, the heat between my legs made me forget everything.

“It's like sex, I told you so” he said between some kisses on my neck, after placing one over each bruise on my face. “First a kiss that you don’t expect, then sex all night, every orgasm less painful, each moan more pleasurable. Having felt such pain and now enjoying the delights that your body and someone else’s will give to you, forgetting the conditions and wounds, to obviate the taste of blood and ignore seeing a naked body covered in bruises, is to have sex while you feel full of life.”

His lips returned to mine, almost crude and desperate to taste me. I had let him convince me with his words and without caring about anything else; I went to feel him over his pants. His erection was already full underneath his clothes and I barely had to give him a squeeze to hear him moan loudly.

“It’s knowing that you dragged me to a complete perdition and that you tempt me in the worst possible way” I whispered in his ear and Frank let go a short laugh, before he transformed it into a groan when I made contact with his skin under his pants as I slowly caressed his testicles. “What do you want from me?” I sighed into his cheek. He pulled away a little bit to let me see his face.

“I want to show how an orgasm, with all the pain in your body, can be the best of your life” he winked at me, I laughed.

My shirt came off with tremendous speed. His teeth dug into my skin and he bit everything he could, including my hard nipples by the intrepidity of each of his actions. My injured ribs were also victims, but as I said, I felt no pain, only pleasure far beyond my knowledge and any of my past experiences. When he reached my navel he made me moan loudly, my erection colliding with his chin underneath the clothing and then he placed his teeth over it, just half opening his mouth, and although I did warn him not to do it, he didn’t listen. A delicate touch had spread all over my hard-on, and then after my reason traveled to hell and came back, I saw him digging through my clothes and exposing my vulnerability. He took me into his mouth and swallowed with the same aggressiveness that he used in his fights.

Maybe I died during small periods of time, perhaps I went to hell again and sat down with the very Devil himself, perhaps I went around the world three times and then came back to find him still stuck there, giving me such pleasure. His pink lips, beaten and bruised around my erection in rhythmic movements up and down, sometimes slowly, sometimes fast, his tongue licking at the tip as he then he took all of me back to the bottom of his throat. My fingers ached by the force exerted over the sheets and my chin for not wanting to separate my lips to let out the loud groans that I wanted to shout.

“How do you like this, Gerard? Would you like me to blow you until the end? Or do you want to play some more?” he asked while taking a moment.

Sure I wanted him to take me to the end, but the idea of playing more also caught my attention. I pulled him towards me by grabbing his shoulders and kissed his lips again, biting slowly to feel his taste in my mouth.

“Come here” he said and then grabbed my hand and pulled me up next to him.

After standing in the middle of his room, I ended up getting rid of my pants and he did the same. Before I even realized what he was planning, I took him by the waist and kissed his neck while one of my hands clenched tightly between his legs. His groan fell directly on my right ear and then he bit me. He pushed me toward the window and opened it with a strong push. The view was all white and cold; there wasn’t a soul nearby. The cold air froze my chest, and then I felt him push me further, enough for me to hold on to the window frame - it was freezing cold.

“Stay there, don’t you move” he said from behind me.

I waited for no more than ten seconds. When he returned, he had a small bottle in his hands. He asked me to still keep my back to him, staring at the window. Soon I felt the lightness of his kisses on the back of my neck and down on my spine. It made me sigh. One hand squeezed my ass and the other separated my legs slowly. Perhaps I knew what was coming, but I didn’t say anything, didn’t stop his fingers, covered in the lube, from touching me. I couldn’t help but moan.

He whispered in my ear “This lube heats up when you blow it. Do you want me to blow there, Gerard?” His lips danced on my skin and I nodded carelessly, but then when I felt him kneel behind me and blow where his fingers had been, the warm feeling made me swallow a cry and let out a loud moan. “It’s the pain of anticipation, knowing that you expect something that does not come. You're imagining something that has not happened yet, something that you won’t want to end, something so strong, like the pain, like the pain in your ribs. Like the pain of your anxiety” he said, speaking into that spot, whispering there slowly, sometimes blowing a little, then squeezing my ass with his hands before getting to his feet again.

He took my jaw to kiss me and without further notice, he was inside me. The position was not the most pleasant: standing with wavering legs, exposed to the world and bearing the cold that seeped through the window. Frank’s thrusts were fast and hard. I could tell that he had experience, since he quickly found my prostate. I can’t even repeat all of the atrocities that he whispered into my ear, because I keep them only for my memory. What I know is that I could have come just by listening to his words and sighs. What I do share is when he stopped inside me, just before my climax and asked me to appreciate the next orgasm, because it’d hurt as much as I’d like it. So even though I didn’t understand his words at all, I did witness what he promised. He repeatedly hit that sweet spot and while I came, he squeezed my testicles with his hand, tight but careful, leaving me breathless. I fell on my knees, overwhelmed by the pain, but feeling the ravages of my orgasm attacking my heart and my senses. Between my legs slipped what he had left in me, the pleasure caused by a very weird lover who enjoyed pain.

“As soon as you can, please come to bed,” he asked while giving a gentle massage to my shoulders, and just minutes later I followed.

That night I reached a fifth orgasm, as promised. I forgot about the pain. There was no more torture or another of his strange attacks. The night was purely sensual and sexual: every touch, every word, every time we gazed at each other until we would orgasm. Never before I had a lover like him, one who enjoyed every touch and every sigh, never someone like him that dizzyingly begged me to look at his face when he was about to come, one who asked me loudly to touch him on his most sensitive parts.

That weekend, we didn’t leave the room. Frank told me that it was the first time that he missed a night at the ring and I thanked him with a blowjob. Late at night, I started painting with the art supplies that I had bought and he had kept in his car. I painted our fight with the blood all over the snow and our bodies crashing together, however, I couldn’t help but to draw us in a kiss, a painful one that proved that we were alive and passionate.

Frank bit my neck when I showed him what I had painted and told me that night that he was planning to leave Jersey and that he would travel south to Texas to begin his plot upon society there. He asked me to join him, and right now, while he´s sleeping on the bed, after I fucked him a couple of times, in the remote Texan desert, I wrote this.

FIN


End file.
